Unbroken
by Christine Hart
Summary: A few months after Reichenbach and papering over the happy face on the back wall, John feels the inevitable threads of depression pulling at him. But what he encounters one lonely night in his chair may change his mind completely...for better, or for worse. (Oneshot.) (I'm not good at writing these. The description is better than the synopsis, I promise.)


Note from the author: I do not own Sherlock. Sherlock is written by Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and owned by the BBC. And so it is Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and the BBC that I have to blame for all my feels...

* * *

_SUICIDE OF A FAKE GENIUS_

_ Web detective phenomenon Sherlock Holmes died yesterday morning after jumping from the top of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Within minutes of his death, Holmes was wheeled inside the infirmary, where he was pronounced dead from the impact at 10:37AM._

_ Holmes, 35, gained his fame in the media from the popular personal blog of friend and partner John Watson, who outlined their many ventures solving difficult criminal cases. The blog, however, along with its star, was proved to be a fraud when actor Richard Brooks revealed that Holmes had hired him to play the detective's supposed archenemy, "James Moriarty." Brooks told reporters that Holmes himself had in fact invented every mystery that he ever solved for the purpose of making himself a genius in the eyes of the public. Brooks was found dead, killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound through the mouth, on the roof of St. Bartholomew's Hospital the same morning._

_ Though Brooks' death remains largely ambiguous, Holmes is thought to have ended his life over his own inability to cope with his deceit being exposed._

_ "I always thought he couldn't be for real," says one anonymous colleague of Holmes at New Scotland Yard. "No one could be that clever. I'm just sorry he had to hurt so many people to try to fool everyone into thinking it." Others who worked with Holmes at Scotland Yard, including unofficial employer Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade, refused to comment._

_ Sherlock Holmes is survived by older brother Mycroft Holmes and close friend John Watson. Both the elder Holmes and Watson declined to be interviewed._

_ Memorial services will be held Saturday, June 25, at St. Michael's Church in Camden Town, London._

...

Mrs. Hudson dropped by to give me my post in the evening. I'd never gone down to get it that day. Ten o'clock, and she assumed I'd be up. I was. I was sitting in my chair, watching telly with a plate of bread crumbs and scraps from my supper resting on the low lip of the table next to me. It had become routine on my free days or when I returned home: slap together some sort of meal and some tea, sit down in my chair, and pull the blanket hanging over the back of it onto my lap before turning on the television. I tried not to watch the news. It was cold enough in the flat as it was.

"Evening!" Mrs. Hudson chirped about a foot outside my door before she toddled lightly in the door. "I got these from the postbox for you."

She said it as a greeting, a forewarning to her entrance, but I had recognized her footsteps coming up many minutes ago, that high tapping of a small woman in heels. It had been months by then – I didn't know exactly how many – and hers were the only feet traveling up and down the stairs with any regularity anymore. Everyone else had stopped coming by. I couldn't blame them. After a while, people move on. That's what they used to tell me, too.

I looked up at the older woman and swiveled my head as far as it can go as she walked around the back of my chair. "I'll get this for you, dear," she said, and reached down to collect my plate and cup from the table top, bare besides the lamp.

I nodded my thanks and turned back to the screen. "The kettle's mostly full if you want a cuppa."

From beyond my back, I heard the flick of the light switch, the soft slap of the little pile of paper envelopes hitting the counter, and then the clank of the dish in the bottom of the sink. Then stillness, as my landlady stood uselessly in the middle of the kitchen. No doubt she was looking for something to clean – even after all the years of swearing up and down at us that she was _not _our cleaning lady – but there was nothing for her to get her hands on. She'd dusted only a few days ago, and except for what had been that breakfast plate, the flat was cleaner than it ever had been before.

"How's your foot? You did get all the glass, I hope. When was the last time you cleaned anyway?" Her tone of voice sounded like she was standing in the middle of a repulsive, stinking bog.

"I don't know, perhaps a month ago," I told her without turning. "Besides sweeping the floor yesterday."

"You must not be touching a single thing in this place," Mrs. Hudson said. Her voice had turned downward. "It always looks the same."

That was not entirely true. A few weeks ago, I'd turned the red armchair I then sat in to face the television. It used to be facing the left window, and the other chair. Apart from that, she was right; the flat really did look exactly as it had when we'd first cleaned everything out. There were no more microscopes or beakers all over the kitchen table, no more case papers and newspapers and mags lying around on the floor and sticking out from under things. All books were on the shelves in the corner by the fireplace, or at least near the shelves. There was not a single thing on the mantle. The sheet music and the music stand were gone. I'd put new wallpaper up over the yellow smiling face full of bullet holes on the back wall.

Mrs. Hudson's shoes clicked behind me again, coming in a loop to the middle of the room with her hands around a cup full of the tea I'd offered her to help herself to. She didn't sit in the sagging, teal-green leather chair across from mine. No one sat in that chair. Everyone knew not to. "What is it you're watching?"

"It's – uh," I muttered, and pointed my finger at the commotion going on onscreen. A wild and lean spotted cat was running after some poor gazelle across never-ending grasslands. "Thing about big cats."

"Oh." A pause, and then the chimes inquired about my work. "How is it, then, at the hospital?"

"I'll have the rent on time for you this time, Mrs. Hudson." I glanced up at her and nodded just once – my contract. My landlady looked doubtful. I knew that it was not about the payment. She set her cup down behind her on the desk between the two windows and clasped her hands together.

"And your answer is still no?" She sounded sympathetically sad, and as ever, confused by the answer she knew I would give her. One of her hands was ever so slightly touching the top of the teal chair's arm, her fingers then sinking into the fatty plush of it.

Mrs. Hudson was a friend, a dear friend, but I still wanted to stand up and snarl at her, to bellow at her to not touch that. I held back. I was good at that, reining myself in. I was a soldier, after all, trained to be discrete. Only my jaw tightened.

"No," I told her calmly, and turned back to the television. The documentary narrator was telling me that cheetahs could not roar. "I just want to be alone."

It was the third of her proposals, to get another flatmate, but just like the first two suggestions, I wouldn't have it. No one would be going on holiday or moving away or moving in. No movement anywhere. I just wanted everything to sit still.

Mrs. Hudson stood there a minute more, looking down at me with one hand in a loose fist. I knew she wanted to say more, but she wouldn't. Eventually, she let her hand off the chair and paced away to leave, forgetting her tea cup, still full, on the edge of the desk. The drumming of toe and heel stopped at the door. "Well, I'll be off, then," she said, all quiet. I could hear her still trying to smile.

"Good night, Mrs. Hudson."

I hardly heard the woman close the building door on the ground floor over the sound of the cheetah ripping apart the flanks of the screeching African deer. Of course, then my mobile started to ring, a distraction interrupting my distraction.

Ella Thompson calling, the display told me when I picked it out of my pocket. I immediately tossed the phone onto the table right where my plate had been. I'd returned for just one session all those months ago on the insistence of friends, but after completely breaking down in front of the therapist, I'd decided it wasn't worth paying her a considerable number of pounds to relive the experience. It was probably out of concern for her wallet that she'd been trying to get a hold of me lately.

I never wanted to pick up. Ella Thompson's number started with the same digits. It looked too similar to what had been his number. My mind replayed that last phone call every time she rang.

I heard my friend crying, begging me not to leave, to stay right where I was, to watch him jump. I saw his body lying on the pavement in front of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. His face bore the void and gruesome expression of death. It was striped with red trickling down from his head and mouth into the muddied crimson puddle under his skull, crushed. Dark brown locks of hair lay matted and soaking in it. His eyes were staring at me. The tears were still on his cheeks, mixing with the blood.

It was still ringing.

I let the call go through to record on my answer phone while I turned my attention back to the telly. The cat was eating its victim, evidenced in the leftover carnage all over its mouth. I changed the channel.

...

It was a while later, and I'd had the television on for some time. I'd fallen asleep once or twice already. I was in a daze, half asleep, when I heard a sound creaking. It must have been the wooden shelves settling, I thought, but then there was an echo of the same sound coming from outside the door to the flat. It was not the shelves. It was in the stairwell. I muted the mumbling television program to listen, and I heard it again, consistently: steps on the stairs. They were too heavy to be Mrs. Hudson's – probably a man's. The creaking I'd heard, I realized, must have been when the stepper planted his foot on the one squeaky step towards the bottom of the first flight. Someone was stepping lightly, trying to keep quiet, but the tempo of the pats of the toes on the wood planks was rapid. Whoever it was, he was coming carefully, but quickly.

I tried to think to myself who would be sneaking in such a rush up the stairs at nearly midnight, and I came up blank. What I did come up with was that I had a cricket bat sitting underneath the sofa against that re-papered back wall and a handgun in a kitchen drawer.

I turned off the television and stood. The someone was at my door. He didn't knock, but there was a distinct scrape of pins against metal inside the lock. I decided on the gun.

I crept to the corner of the kitchen, just behind the sliding wooden doors separating it from the living room, and hid myself behind the wall with the gun held close with the muzzle parallel with my cheek. I waited for the burglar to pick his way through the lock so I could point death at him from the short barrel of the handgun, or at least indulge myself with the satisfaction of whacking him with it. I was ready to pleasantly surprise the fellow. My toes curled in my socks at the thought of it, at the anticipation. The adrenaline was pumping, all right, and it gave me such a thrill that I forgot for a moment.

At long last, the door swung open with a long squeal until it came to a stop with a gentle thump against the wall behind it. There was silence. The intruder was rising slowly, and the fabrics of his clothes whispered into the air against each other. He took two steps forward into the room and then stopped, what I could only guess was about ten feet away. His shoes clapped even closer. I took a breath.

I jumped two sidesteps out towards my target and swung. My whole arm and shoulder felt spring loaded. The violent backhanded arch ended in a crack across the side of his head above me – he, like everyone else, was taller than I was.

The bloke dropped to the floor as if he'd been pulled down by a current. I hit him so hard that he even spun around, and landed on his chest on the floor. The feeling I got from watching all of it was immensely satisfying, definitely more so than I would have gotten simply threatening him with a gun. I stood over the downed prowler invigorated, victorious and proud of my catch.

I was stepping over him and moving for my mobile to phone the police when I really looked at him for the first time. I hadn't had a chance while I was busy clobbering him. There was a dark beanie pulled over his hair and most of his forehead, and a ridiculous-looking orange and red striped scarf pulled around to cover everything below the bridge of his nose. Between the two, I couldn't make out most of his features from his profile, but I could see his eyes, small and squinted-looking, even when closed. Memory told me they were that strange and unique mix of ice blue and green, calculating, always calculating, analyzing every speck of dust in the air.

Those eyes. A bit of dark and wavy hair sticking out from beneath the elastic wool fitted onto his head. His height and build, tall and wiry. The coat, the black trench coat with the collar flipped up to hide the back of his neck and part of his cheek. Suddenly, I was noticing all of it.  
My lungs were drawing in a breath that never seemed to stop. I just kept inhaling. I stepped the rest of the way over the man and bowed to roll him onto his back, trying and failing in what few seconds of hesitation I had left to let out my breath. But my throat tightened, trapping the air inside me. I couldn't even swallow as I pulled the patterned scarf off the rest of his face.

The face of my best friend. Unharmed, untainted, unbroken. Alive.

"Sherlock...Sherlock," I managed to gasp when the air in my chest finally came out. It had a funny sort of sound, like wheezing. My medical mind went to work all on its own. I was having difficulty breathing normally. I should sit down. I should find a bag to breathe into. I should focus on calming down. I should really, really sit down.

I did sit. Feeling lightheaded, I collapsed on the floor next to him. The details of the shapes and textures surrounding me melted together, and I almost blacked out. I was barely able to sit up straight, much less clasp the gun in my hand. I let it drop from my fingers and pushed it away from me, partly because I needed the hand to keep myself from toppling, and partly out of guilt. The blow had knocked him completely senseless. His arms and legs all lay spread out from him. A bit of blood was traveling down from his lower temple by his eye, right above the line of the woolen pull over hat, where the gun had made contact and broken skin.

The whole scene was too reminiscent, painfully so. The sight of the man I loved as a brother fallen in front of me, unmoving, pale white. This whole thing was a nightmare, surely. I would reach out for him, just like I did when I had seen him battered and dead by the motorway, and I would feel no life in him. There had been nothing last time, no pulse. I found myself dreading it, but just as if I were reliving the memory, I stretched out my hand to delicately take his wrist between my fingers.

There it was, the little tremor of a heartbeat.

It shouldn't have been possible. I stared at him, and questioned his existence on my floor – on our floor. "Sherlock...?"

He didn't respond, but he was breathing. That was enough of an answer.

He was easier to pick up than most men. He wasn't fragile, but he had always been rather lean, as I had pointed out several times while I was usually trying to get him to eat something. I dragged his dead weight over to the sofa and hauled him up onto it, swinging his legs up last, trailing coat and all. I stuffed pillows under his head to make up for his height since he almost didn't fit – he was too tall. I'd nearly forgotten that.

When he started to come around an hour later, I was also reminded how cranky he could be. Of course, I had to remind myself, most people would be cranky if they woke up with a dreadful headache.

First, there was a groan. I was in the kitchen when I heard it, having made some tea and about to drink it to try to keep myself awake. It was well past one in the morning, but I couldn't let myself doze off. Head trauma automatically constituted observation from a physician, and I was not about to leave him alone anyway, not when I already thought he might be a figment of my depressed mind finally going to shit.

When I heard him, I abandoned the kettle and made my best effort to move forwards without running into the living room. I saw him make a failed attempt to get up from his makeshift bed and trip over his own right foot as soon as I rounded the corner. His balance was off.

"Easy there," I told him, and gently helped to hoist him up from where he'd managed to catch himself on his hands and knees. His reflexes, then, were not completely shot. It was encouraging to see after watching him fall over.

Sherlock's characteristic reaction, of course, was to grumble at me. The edges of his speech were softened, not as sharply pronounced. "I'm fine, I'm perfectly fine. Stop it." He complained, but he didn't even try to brush me off or push me away as I sat him back down on the cushions of the sofa. He was not even willing to put out the effort to hold himself upright. Sherlock let his shoulders sag down to the level of the seat itself, so that he was nearly sitting on the middle of his back, as soon as I let go my hold on him. The overcoat didn't quite stay with him as he slid. The back of it rode up so that the collar was standing straight up around the back of his head. He was Dracula in his cape with curls.

"I'm going to go get some fresh ice. Now that you're up, you can hold it yourself. Stay put," I commanded him, and pointed a finger in his face to make sure he got it. His eyes slightly crossed at it as it came close to his nose. Then I was whipping around in an about face for the kitchen. If I hadn't been so used to the silence in the walls of the flat, I'd of been surprised that there was no snide remark to chase me when I walked away from him.

By the time I got back, Sherlock had discarded the home spun scarf from around his neck to the cushion next to him and had already pulled off the gauze I'd stuck on top of the gash on the side of his head. He was scrutinizing the still red blood on it with narrowed eyes, and dragging his finger through it.

"You _hit _me," he grunted, offended, and tried to hurl the little bandage at me. It went about three feet through the air and then wafted down to the floor. I watched the unintimidating display without a word before I set the bag of ice down.

"Brilliant deduction," I said back. "How'd you figure that one?" I dug the penlight out of the little white box that was already sitting open on the coffee table. "Yeah, I did. Thought you were a burglar. You were sort of dressed like one anyway, with that hat."

Sherlock rolled his eyes upwards, then yanked the beanie off of his head and threw that, too. The dark waves of hair sprang about. "I didn't want to be seen. People might have spotted me," he mumbled as an excuse for the skullcap. The defensive child crossed his arms.

"I'm sure. Now hold still and look straight ahead." I planted one open hand down on the seat next to him and started to bend forward to hold myself suspended over his lap. He was so far slouched back that I couldn't get the penlight close to his face any other way. He looked nervous watching me come at him, excessively glaring like a cat ready to scratch if anyone got too close. Still, he didn't budge, not even fidgeting.

"Completely unnecessary," he griped at me under his breath.

"Shut up. You could move forward if you don't like it," I muttered crossly back at him. I checked his eyes quickly, flashing the penlight across first the right eye, then the left. Pupil dilation was fine.

"Really, John." Sherlock grimaced at me, exasperated. His voice always got a little deeper than it already was when he was being condescending. He disliked, I was sure, the fuss he thought I was making over nothing – as well as the fact that the proximity of the whole ordeal made him exceedingly uncomfortable.

"Stop. I'll not have this from you. I'm a doctor and it's my job." I refused to look at his face or even move my head in his direction as I was sure he was throwing his usual frown at me. Instead, I focused on putting the light back in its proper place in the first aide box.

"I've had worse."

I wasn't sure whether he'd said it on purpose to aggravate the mood, or whether he was just making his usual annoying conversation. It didn't matter, in the end, because it had hit a nerve. Again, I held my tongue, clamped my jaw shut for a moment, and used the sharp snap of the boxed kit closing to slap myself back into composure.

I leaned over him again. "Keep watching my finger," I said through clenched teeth. I viciously stabbed the air four inches away from between his eyes with my pointer finger.

"I th – "

"Damnit, Sherlock, shut your bloody mouth and watch my finger so I can know whether I can hit you upside the head again or not."

Sherlock frowned deeply at the threat. "Oh for God's sakes," he sputtered, but then actually did shut up for a moment and centered his vision on my finger roving around in front of him with such an intense concentration that I thought my whole hand might catch fire.

"Tracking's fine," I murmured. I picked myself up from the floor and sat next to Sherlock with a disgruntled sigh. "You'll be fine. Great even, considering your initial underlying condition. Here, hold that on your head if you so desire, though as your doctor, I'd advise it." I leaned forward to take the ice pack in my hand from where it was on the coffee table and tossed it at him.

Sherlock only sounded about half disinterested. "I _have_ no other condition – what underlying condition?" he questioned.

"Deceased."

There was a long pause. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw him turn to glance at me, then turn back to resume dead panning straight ahead towards the empty mantle. Ice crackled. He was nuzzling his bruised head into the cold pack.

"You're not a very good doctor, John." It was an affectionate sarcasm. I wasn't so keen.

"I kept my eyes on you, just like you asked," I blurted. My voice broke somewhere in the middle and I hadn't wanted it to – not the first time it had happened . Every time I swallowed, trying to draw on all my military training, the sore spot high in my throat didn't want to be gulped down. "All the way down. I think I know a dead man when I see one."

"Well, obviously not, seeing as how I'm sitting here talking to you. I know that you must think yourself some sort of an expert on the subject – what with your experiences in warfare abroad and with me dealing and putting up with London's 'finest' – but please do attempt to be reasonable and look at the facts? This is an obvious one, even for someone like you."

"I _saw _it. I saw..._all _of it."

Sherlock snorted and pushed his head farther into the ice. "Oh my god_, _I may as well be talking to the face that _used _to be on the wall – _no,_ you didn't. Though I suppose that if I did that good of a job convincing you to the point where you're even trying to convince _me _that I'm a corpse, then I really should be congratulating myself."

I stared at him. This was one of his games. He was enjoying it, too. So smug, he was. He sat there with his head tilted away from me, peeking at me sideways, and he was smirking at me. He was practically begging me to ask him how he did it, how his genius had allowed him to play out his own death so very well. He wanted recognition for his work, but there was no way in hell I was about to give him that satisfaction. I was too angry. I still wanted to punch him right in the nose.

"Doesn't matter," I retorted, and shook my head as I turned away. "Doesn't matter what I did or didn't see or whatever you pulled off. I checked your pulse."

"I know you did."

"Don't give me that, you 'knew.' You couldn't have, because you didn't havea _pulse_, because you were _dead_, Sherlock, you were dead."

"Ah, you're using past tense. Now we're getting somewhere, at least. But I hardly see the point of beating me over the head with irrelevant incorrect information when I am quite clearly _sitting _– "

"I _know _where you're sitting. I see you."

"So, then! Stop this – this whatever it is – annoying, grouching thing that you're doing, and let me explain – "

"Yes, please do explain to me why I wasn't included in your little joke."

"It wasn't a joke," Sherlock shot at me hotly, clipping all the consonants to sound even more harsh. "It was to save your life. A little gratitude, John. And stop interrupting me, you know I don't like to be interrupted."

I just stopped. My brain started scrounging and digging and trying to come up with an interpretation of those words, _"to save your life."_ I became so caught up in my head that I blinked, and realized that my e yes hadn't even seen the room around me for a few seconds. I found myself turning my whole body in order to face him, completely lost. "What?"

"Moriarty," he sang at me as if I were stupid. "Obviously. He would have had his vicious little lackeys gunning you down in the street like a dog if I'd refused."

I shook my head. "I don't understand. If they wanted to kill you, they could have just as easily done it themselves. Besides, I thought Moriarty's chums had wanted to keep you alive for some reason."

Sherlock flicked his hand at the wrist as if he were swatting at an annoying fly buzzing around him and his superior thinking space – the metaphorical fly probably being me, I thought. "They kept me alive because Moriarty wanted me to do the job myself," Sherlock rattled off his summary, "and finish off the business of permanently ruining myself in front of the entire nation."

"And so you did," I muttered bitterly.

"More or less."

"So after all that, you just gave him what he wanted."

"I had to." Sherlock lifted his head up for the first time and smiled lightly at me. A warmth mellowed out his tone as he spoke. "You didn't believe me when I told you I had made everything up."

" 'Course I didn't." I cleared my throat, then added, "And, well, you can't believe everything you hear, not even if it's from you. Not even if your act up there on the ledge of Bart's Hospital was brilliant, with the hysteria and the crying. Yeah, you really had me going. And with the blood all over the pavement – that bit was quite good."

All was silent. Even when I sensed him turning towards me, the movement made no noise. Then a word, just one. He spoke it in a lowered tone, a cello sadly humming.

"John."

"No, really," I snapped at him. "You should win an award – Sherlock, for Best Actor, for your performance." My fists – I hadn't even noticed that I'd clenched them up – began to shake. Even my voice betrayed me and warbled all over from octave to octave.

"John." My name sounded considerably more sorrowful when he said it again. "I couldn't tell you. I needed to disappear, completely."

My whole body was practically vibrating with an energetic anger, and it drove me to stand on my feet. "Why?" I whispered, and my voice began to break apart to let through all the furious depression I'd been trying to shred up for months. There were tears dripping down my face as I took two handfuls of his coat and stood there above him, arms convulsing, yanking and joggling him forcefully enough that, surprised, he dropped the ice. "I _needed _ you, and you did that to me! Why'd you _do _it, Sherlock?! Do you have any idea, you – you bloody stupid...!"

I assaulted him with every insult I could think of, and having been in the army, it was not a short list. All the awful names, all the swear words I had ever learned came out in a storm, and I howled them at him without holding myself back. Sherlock didn't so much as flinch.

When I did finally stop, having run out of breath, I could only stand there uncertainly and pant. I was still clutching him by the lapels of his trench coat. My fingers felt stiff as death and locked in place. Though it was physical painful to do so, I did manage to let go, uncurling one stony finger at a time until my hands were free. Sherlock did nothing but watch me evenly the whole time he was waiting for me to get a hold on myself. His gaze had become steadily locked on me, as if listening to my expression.

I hadn't lost my temper like that for so long. Every bone in my body was chattering; the violence of it was unsettling. I found myself needing space, and I retreated away – or at least, I tried to. The coffee table was not far behind me, and I bumped into it with the back of my legs after only having taken two steps.

I stayed planted where I was with my head ducked. From what I could see of his shoes, Sherlock stayed where he was as well. Several minutes passed before I looked up again, and he had turned away. His face was changing. The placid pool rippled.

"I'm sorry, John."

He sounded so dejected, and anxious. The remorse was running off him like water. He awkwardly fiddled with his hands in his lap. The emotions, genuine from everything I could tell, were making him antsy. I couldn't fathom it.

Sherlock suddenly lurched out of his seat towards me and pulled me into a hug. With our height difference, I got a nose full of black wool and tweed. I was too stunned by the whole business to care much about it. I was too stunned to even form any sort of speech in my mouth when Sherlock Holmes was using words and hugs to apologize.

I embraced him back, my best friend, and managed to speak my muffled words of forgiveness to him. It appeared that he'd needed to hear it, that it was all fine again; he sighed out the poisonous, doubtful breath he'd been holding.

It was a rare moment, and the moment I would hold onto. But I could practically hear the seconds ticking by, so I patted his back and politely cleared my throat. Sherlock did the same and stepped back, scratching the back of his head and sniffing.

I smirked and shook my head.

"What?" Sherlock asked. The sheer leeriness in his voice made me actually start to laugh, which evoked another frustrated "What?!"

I crossed my arms and shook my head with a smile. "I was just thinking that people would probably pay the next two or three months' rent for a photo of us two minutes ago to put in the papers."

We both had a laugh over it, chuckling, mine high and his low, over the mere thought of the headlines.

...

I went later to the kitchen to dump the melted ice in the sink and to pour the tea that I'd left in the kettle on the stove. It was still warm. I heard the television being turned on over the clanking of taking down another cup from the cupboard, and I turned to look. Sherlock had shed his coat and deposited it somewhere; he standing in front of the screen in one of his usual dark , long sleeve button-ups and trousers, making some odd scowl at whatever was playing. I watched as I walked over, amused, as he trooped about the living room inspecting what must have certainly looked like an entirely new flat to him without all of his messy genius spread out everywhere. The bookshelf caught his attention. He dodged over the floor – and the room's other coffee table – to run his finger along the bound spines, thinking. Then he was circling his old leather chair, circling it and looking at it, but not sitting in it.

"Here," I said, and held out one of the cups to him.

Sherlock looked up and blanked when saw the cup in my hand. "Oh. Sorry, none for me."

"You said you wanted some."

"No," he began to correct me. "_You _asked me if I wanted some and I didn't answer you and so you assumed that I did. You assumed incorrectly."

"Well, here," I said, still extending it towards him. "Take it anyway."

"Why?"

"You might want some later."

"I doubt it. Why would I want some later?"

"I don't know! I made the tea, and I poured the tea, so just – take it, will you? Please."

He looked at the tea, looked at me, then took the mug by the handle and turned right around to set it down on the desk behind him. I saw then that he had thrown his coat over the back of the desk's chair. The sight of it there was natural, as the chair was his other coat rack when he couldn't be bothered to hang it on the back of the door. It was just like what had been normal so many months ago. Even the hour seemed familiar. I had always been up late when Sherlock was around. Regular sleep patterns were optional and often overlooked.

This was precisely the reason why I raised my eyebrows at Sherlock when he yawned, eyed his watch, and then gave me a look as if to say I was invading his bedtime. I contentedly sipped my tea and waited for him to explain.

"It's...nearly two," he said slowly.

I twisted my wrist around to check my watch as well. "Yes, it is."

"And you're not tired."

"Because I'm drinking tea. And you're not." I pointed with my chin over to where the cup sat, alone and pale on the wood.

Sherlock casually rolled his eyes toward it, and in one careless swipe, picked up and put the cup back down in the exact same spot. "It's cold," he told me indifferently.

"Really? Already?" I wondered aloud, puzzled. "Mine's all right."

He didn't look phased at all; he just stood there behind his arm chair with his hands behind his back. The impatient tapping sound his foot made against the floor said everything.

"I suppose we could turn in, if you'd like. Separately," I added when he squinted at me.

Sherlock's eyes went over and down the walls of the flat, as though he were looking for something. It seemed that every corner and open space he saw struck him harder. A few minutes passed, and the silence seemed to settle in his eyes. The blue suddenly looked dull. "You really cleaned away everything, didn't you?" he murmured sadly, almost whispering it to himself.

"What?" I asked. "You all right?"

Sherlock got back to looking at me, and his gaze definitely looked glazed over. "I'm sure you wanted me to tell you about Bart's. I'm sorry. You have my word, you'll understand in the morning. How _did_ all the king's men put Sherlock's egg back together again?" he sang sarcastically and strolled, hands in pockets, toward the sofa.

"Right," I muttered, and gulped down the last of my tea as I turned in the opposite direction for the kitchen.

"Oh!" he shouted abruptly after me. "You didn't donate my violin did you?"

"No," I called back over my shoulder to assure him. "Like I would let anyone else have your precious violin! It's in the cupboard in my room. Anyways, where would you like to sleep? You could always take my bed upstairs. I wouldn't mind. Haven't really been sleeping that well in it anyway." I left my cup to soak at the bottom of the sink, and paused, waiting for him to answer. "Sherlock?"

I walked back out, thinking he might have been distracted by the television. But he wasn't even looking at the telly, or looking at anything. He was collapsed on the sofa, eyes closed, fingers lax and curling just slightly inwards by his cheek. Only part of the striped orange scarf he'd come in wearing was poking out and hanging down over the edge of the seat; the rest of it was crushed somewhere underneath the pillows beneath his head.

"Or you could just sleep on the sofa," I murmured. I took the blanket that hung over the back of my armchair and pulled it over him all the way up to his shoulders. The loose threads that hung frazzled from the corner brushed against his face, but he must have really been dead tired; he didn't so much as twitch.

I ambled over to my armchair and let myself fall into it. "I'll just be here, then. Goodnight, Sherlock." I let my head recline back, and let the drone of the television that he'd left on put me straight to sleep.

...

When the light from the rising sun hit me square in the face, there was a single violin playing a beautiful string of notes, wailing softly muted in the background.

I woke with a jolt. My head bucked upwards, hurting my neck, which had stayed tweaked backwards for too long. The television program was playing at a low volume. I'd forgotten to turn it off. The newscaster was going on about some young violinist, the newest addition to the London Symphony Orchestra.

I shook my head to shake my brain awake. The blanket I'd given to Sherlock had been laid over my lap and over my hands as well, which had been resting on top of my knees when I'd fallen asleep. I groaned as I saw Sherlock's untouched tea still sitting on the desk, then swung around to look towards the sofa to glower at him for leaving it out all night.

There was his orange woven scarf on the couch cushion. The soiled medical cotton was still settled on the floor near the leg of the coffee table where he'd thrown it. Sherlock and his coat were gone.

My legs were still waking up but I scrambled up anyway. I looked around me. Of everywhere I could see, the flat was vacant. I power walked past the fridge and through to the hall behind the kitchen and burst through the very last door in the back. His old room was empty. Panicking, I pushed through the side door leading to the stair landing, then ran up two steps at a time to the third floor. My room was just as I'd left it, stark and impersonal and without company.

"Mrs. Hudson!" I shouted. I was jumping down the steps all the way until I arrived panting at her door, swinging my fist against the wood. "Mrs. Hudson! Mrs. Hudson!"

The woman opened the door a pinch. There were many large curlers in her short hair and a few more in her hand. She looked quite alarmed and self-consciously picked at the ones on her head with her fingernails. I probably looked like a mad man, with eyes wide in my clothes from yesterday and breathing so hard.

"What is it? Everything all right?" she asked me kindly. Her eyes darted about my face, worried, as she hung onto the edge of the black painted door with one hand. She looked so timid standing there that I suddenly felt guilty for pounding on her door. Still, that didn't stop me.

"Mrs. Hudson, I need to know right now: did anyone come down the stairs? Do you know? Did you hear anyone coming down the stairs, or the door open? Anything like that?"

Her brow furrowed even more at the questions, but she shook her head no. "It's been quiet all morning," she told me slowly, and her voice pitched higher. "What's wrong, John? Did you miss your sister again?"

My sister, Harriet. Harry had come to visit. I remembered her knocking on the open door. Hugging me. Talking. Drinking tea. Arguing. Storming out of the flat, leaving her November-colored scarf on the sofa cushion. She'd told me I should quit the bottle. I'd called her a hypocrite.

I'd been drinking that night. Drinking and trying to swallow it. Dropping the glass. Stepping on the glass. Swearing. Bleeding onto the floor. Hobbling to the couch, mopping up the blood with gauze, throwing the gauze on the floor, leaving it there. Had I picked it up?

Then Mrs. Hudson had come by the next evening. She'd stood by the chair, holding her tea. Mothering me. Sighing. Forgetting the tea on the edge of the desk.

Sherlock had complained that his tea was cold.

"John?"

I blinked. I'd been blankly gawking at poor Mrs. Hudson the entire time. I stumbled back, and shook my head downwards until my nose was pointed at my toes.

"Are you all right, dear?" Mrs. Hudson asked. She reached a hand through the open doorway, very cautious, but then pulled back as if suddenly afraid that she would spook me or make me run off.

I gave her a shaky reassurance that I was okay, then I left Mrs. Hudson to continue fiddling with her morning hair and stomped back upstairs. I stepped on the squeaky step for no other reason than to hear the sound of it. As for the door, I approached it as I always did – dreadfully. The dark green door, faded and peeling, had always towered in front of me like a decaying grave marker. That was exactly what the flat was, a grave, keeper of the dead. It meant that I could walk in and expect to be greeted by the silence of all that was buried there.

I hadn't been able to bear it at first. I'd gone to live with Harry for a short while, but I'd ended up coming back. I couldn't help thinking of Bakerstreet as the place that things had happened, the place that things used to happen. So I'd come back. I'd withstood the grief. There was a mist that always surrounded me when I was inside that place, memories of the past that I was addicted to, and unwilling to let go of.

Mycroft Holmes had told me once that bravery was the kindest euphemism for stupidity, and I'd been being so very brave about choosing to stay at the flat for the sake of the past I was so attached to Now, for the first time, I thought to myself that maybe I really was just being stupid.

I moaned to myself. I was starting to sound just like my own therapist.

"Speak of the devil," I muttered aloud as my mobile started ringing from the table by the telly where I'd left it. I leaned over to glance at the screen, thought I recognized the first few numbers, and swore at Ella Thompson. "Piss off!" I shouted at the ringing phone.

Something caught my eye. A navy blue knitted lump lay crashed in the middle of the carpet. The beanie, Sherlock's beanie. I bent over to hoist it gently from below, and looked at it. I was confused. I did not own one of those hats. No one I knew that had been over owned one. So where had it come from? I ground the yarn between my forefinger and thumb while I squinted at the orange scarf on the sofa. Suddenly, I found my reasoning splitting into two.

I went to pick up my mobile again, not because it had made a noise, but because it hadn't. Ella Thompson had apparently not left her usual cheerfully concerned message on the answer phone. In fact, the display didn't even have her name listed as the caller. I looked at the number a third time – yes, the first numbers were the same. But they always were. That was always how I'd recognized her calls, because the number always looked like –

I jumped and nearly dropped the hat in my hand. "Redial, redial," I mumbled, and then whipped the phone up to my ear. My breath was choppy as I waited, my last hope. The hat was getting strangled.

It rang once. "Your call cannot be completed as dialed," the pleasant little automated woman's voice told me. "This number has been disconnected. Please check the number and dial again."

"No, it hasn't. I just got a call from this number, so how the hell can it be disconnected?!" I barked into the mouth piece. I quickly shut up when I realized that I was arguing with a machine. It wouldn't be the first time.

I hung up in a hurry and stared down at the mobile. My hands were quaking. It was building. I dropped the phone on my chair before my arm wound up and hurled it across the room. I needed to get out – my head was in a fog, and I was staring at the wall without a sane thought in my head. A walk would help, I decided, so I went to grab my jacket. The beanie was still in my hand so I put it on, pulling it down over my ears and forehead. It looked cold outside anyway.

I ignored Mrs. Hudson as I trotted down the stairs to the ground floor. I could hear her calling me from within her flat, and she was coming to the door. No doubt she would be pestering me again with her questions and more holiday pitches, and God knows I didn't want to deal with the prying. I skirted out the front door of the building before she opened hers and made a run for it, jogging lightly down the street for the corner. Several people made way for me on the pavement, all with looks of surprise, as if I looked like I was on my way to something significant in my beanie and green jacket.

I looked back over my shoulder just once, caught up in my escape. I was so eager to get away from the woman behind me that I ran straight into some bloke right in front of me.

He was an older fellow, with a beard like a bib, wearing an aged fisherman's jacket and a cabbie hat pulled down low over his eyes. The tall and graying gentleman was carrying a load of books in a bag and a few more by hand, and as I collided into him, I knocked them from his arms. The ground was damp from recent rain; this he pointed out in an irritated tone several dozen times while I apologized for getting the pages of his novels wet. We both crouched down to gather the clutter of volumes at our feet.

The gentleman's eyes flashed blue from beneath the lip of his cap to look at me suspiciously while he shoved the spilled books back into his shoulder bag. "Nice hat," he said in passing, though he sounded like he didn't mean it.

"It's not mine."

"Then what are you wearing it on your head for?" the older man lowly chuckled.

I thought about that, trying to come up with a good answer for a stranger whose books I was awkwardly holding in the middle of Bakerstreet. "I'm...keeping it warm for somebody, I suppose."

"Ha!" he laughed at me, then snatched the last book from the concrete. "With this weather, you should get it back to him and let him keep it warm himself. You look like a carjacker with it on anyways, running down the street like that."

"Oh," I stuttered, realizing what I must have looked like running down the street in a panic with a skullcap on my head. No wonder the bystanders had been parting to form a neat path for me to run down. "No, I live just down there. I was running from my landlady – " I sighed, and stopped talking. The real story really didn't sound much better. "Nevermind. Sorry I got your books all soggy."

"The buyer won't be happy about it," the man huffed. He bent his head to adjust the strap of the sack. "Believe me. It might behoove you to pay more attention to your surroundings. Think about it next time you go running out in the street."

Clearly eager to be on his way, the older man pushed past me and continued on down Bakerstreet without giving me a last chance to speak. I was a little glad. I didn't think I could have apologized sincerely even one more time.

I elected to forget about the grouch and keep walking. I was in the middle of being quite successful in my forgetting, as well as halfway down the next street , before I realized I was still holding one of his books in my hands. _The Odyssey, _by Homer. There was a little slip of paper sticking out of the cover with some writing on it. A delivery address, I imagined, since he had mentioned a buyer for the collection he had been carrying with him. I felt badly. Thinking I would return the book, I pulled out the bit of paper from between the pages to read it.

"221B Bakerstreet," it said, stuck into a book telling of the homecoming of one of the cleverest men in history, and a master of disguise.

I bolted all the way back.

When I arrived breathless at the top of the stairs, the door to the flat was hanging halfway open. Inside, I could hear an old violin singing.


End file.
